A brief-yet-ongoing journal of all things Carmi. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll reach for your mouse to click back to Google. But you'll be intrigued. And you'll feel compelled to return following your next bowl of oatmeal. With brown sugar. And milk.

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Sunday, February 28, 2010

Ghost country

Canada is a nation of approximately 35 million people. I'm going to guess pretty much all of them are glued to a television, computer screen or smartphone watching today's Olympic gold medal game between Canada and the U.S.

Well, everyone except our dog, who as I write this lies, eyes happily closed, in the middle of the living room floor, tail pointed directly at the television.

I'm going to guess he's not much of a fan.

Thankfully, he's in the minority. For all my disdain of the professional sporting culture that gives birth to steroidal baseball players, philandering golfers and gun-toting and gambling basketballers, it's nice to see some meaning injected back into the game.

Carmi, I think sports matter when it becomes about the love of the game, not the dollar bill. Growing up in Minnesota, we had two rinks in the park one block from our house; a hockey rink and a figure skating rink. It was always so exciting to watch the boards go up in the fall, and to gather in an excited group to watch the water trucks come to flood the rinks.

The sound of hockey pucks hitting the boards became the sound of winter to me, just as the new skates that Santa brought every year defined Christmas. I don't skate any more, and yet I thrill to figure skating (as I was confined to the "girl's rink" by my brothers), just as I cheer with the the rest of the country for Team USA. It's not just a game, it's a collective heart beat that makes it sports.